Tips & Strategies (6)

Another good way to limit game play is to base the finish time on number of rounds (like Small World or similar games). That gives a rather good measure of where you’re at, and gives each player the same number of turns. It does make exploding in a higher tier ship more painful, but then that’s what shields are for. 🙂

One of the largest issues we’ve had with the game has been that some items feel a little too random. One player has a ship with tier 1 engines and rolls well, they move 15 in one round. Next a player with tier 3 engines rolls poorly and moves 4. How does one make the game still enjoyable, while keeping a balance?

We found a way: All dice rolls for engines and blasters now use d4 (and occasionally d6) to accomplish their goal. Engines/blasters are now d6, 2d4, 3d4, and missiles become 2d4, 3d4, and 2d4+2d6. It raises the base, and redistributes the curve a bit to level out the randomness. Even with super low rolls on a tier 3 engine now, the minimal move is 9.

The only one we don’t augment in this way is shields, since they tend to be over powered already. Those we set as 1d6, 1d8 and 2d6, which makes them a little weaker and reducing the need for a d12 in the game at all.

One of the things that makes Xia such a wonderful game is it was designed to be open, and to let the players make adjustments to how they want to play the game. One thing that we’ve tried a few times in my house is at the start of the game, each player draws a level one title (meaning it is only worth one victory point). Players then start off with that title and ability. It seems to speed things up a little bit and its fun to have a little something at the beginning of the game.

In exploration: if you draw a tile with a market on it and it would be placed next to another one,put the tile aside and draw another one,until there’s one with no market on it.Take all the tiles that was put aside and reshuffle them with the rest of unexplored tiles.Prevents 1 sector commerce route and adds more challenges for people that takes the merchant type side of the game.(these rules can be used for gates too)